In Nightholme, you will not merely hunt monsters. You’ll make the aggressively optimistic decision to assume their forms. Surely nothing can go wrong there.
Before you so much as set foot in the city, you’ll select a formulation of the Nocturn serum, determining which Grimspawn you’ll be channeling for the evening. Do try to let wisdom guide you. The ensuing transformation is not simply cosmetic, despite humanity’s endless talent for horrifying makeovers.
Each Grimspawn has its own strengths, its own weaknesses, and its own… appetites. Given that you’ll be informed of which Gloomfiend rules over the city, the more calculating among you may attempt to tilt the odds with a well-matched form.
Coordinate with teammates. Seek out whatever synergies you lone-wolf types so love to swear on. It’s all very industrious. And sometimes, against all reason, it even works.
Choose well, and you may stagger out the night with most of your organs intact. You might even retain a hint of your former self.
Choose poorly, and you’ll learn just how irrelevant courage becomes in the face of bad chemistry.
Yes, some might say you’re doomed before you even enter the game. We would never be so dramatic.
Though, of course, they’re absolutely right.
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Once you make the choice—I mean, really make it—it’s like stepping off a cliff. No net, no ropes, nothing to catch on. You just freefall until splat. You hit the bottom.
A lot of Grimrunners talk like it’s a beast they’ve got caged inside them. I don’t buy that. It’s not some separate thing taking over your body.
It’s all you. That’s the scary part.
All the way down.
Splat.
You know, before Nocturn, I thought I knew myself. Foggy past aside, the wiring was all there. I thought what I thought and liked what I liked, and I thought my shell was me.
Most people keep to their shells. The brain doesn’t like digging too deep into itself. The soul, even less so.
But Nocturn doesn’t let that slide. The real you isn’t stacked in tidy rows and square corners, right there on the surface. It’s not your favorite movies or your sense of humor or whether you believe in a god. And you know that, deep down. You feel it every time your stomach twists or your hackles rise, or when you’re staring down those vials and your fingers twitch toward a certain brew. A certain Grimspawn.
That twitch, that’s the thing beneath. That’s what’ll be there to meet you once you step off the cliff.
We like to dress it up. Blame Nocturn, the beast in the formula. Throw around the word “survival,” like that justifies anything.
But it’s not survival. It’s not the beast. It’s you, and it’s inevitable.
Like in that rainy alley, claws coming straight for my face. I dodged, barely, and they clipped my arm. And I was already teetering, but that burst of pain shoved me right over. Inevitable.
Time always slows for me. It turns me inside out, swallowed down my own throat. And somewhere deep inside, I come eye to eye with a monster.
Feral and old. A creature of blood and instinct and a long, long memory.
And you know what? It’s like looking into a mirror.
There’s a moment of understanding. Perfect recognition. Then she reaches up, and she tears me open like knives through a paper screen. Movies, memories, hopes, fears—gone in a blink.
And the last thing I think, before thoughts cease to matter, is how fragile that shell really is.
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Discord:
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Stay vigilant, Grimrunners,
— Studio Ellipsis Team